Essay: WHAT THE U.S. KNOWS ABOUT RED CHINA

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∙ THE LEADERSHIP. Mao Tse-tung is in his 73rd year, and his health seems ever more precarious. The Politburo averages 66 years of age, the Central Committee more than 60. Says Columbia University Professor A. Doak Barnett, a leading China expert: "This means that one can say, with actuarial certainty, that before very long virtually the entire top-leadership group will disappear during a relatively brief period, with results that will be felt at every level of the country." The leadership's ideas are also aging. Practically all of the top men are first-stage revolutionaries who made the Long March, the retreat from Chiang Kai-shek's armies for 6,000 miles from east China to the barren northwest in 1934-35. They are afflicted with the "Yenan complex"—a belief in absolute, rigid adherence to the methods by which they survived and ultimately attained power. There are some among the Chinese leadership who clearly have doubts about the present course of Chinese policy, which is leading to a growing isolation of China; most of them are among the "new generation" that is faced with the day-to-day problems of running the country. Mao and his men are out of touch with and unsympathetic to the younger generation of the party, and Mao has already groomed as his heirs-apparent men who will be dutiful preachers of the Maoist gospel. Among them are Party Doctrinal Elder Liu Shao-chi, Teng Hsiao-ping, the party's powerful secretary-general, and Lin Piao, the Defense Minister (see THE WORLD). Eventually, though, the younger generation is bound to rise to leadership, and the China experts hope—but it is only a hope—that they will be more concerned with internal development and less intractable than the present leadership.

A Certainty of Change

As much as the U.S. knows about Red China, the experts are the first to recognize that there is a great deal that it does not—and should—know. Almost nothing is known, for example, about the exact process of decision making among Mao and his colleagues. Who are the Red Chinese hawks and who are the doves? Is there a show of hands in critical disputes, or does Mao decide by fiat? The hardest information to get is on the party's cadre organization, and only a minimum of biographical material is available on the leadership. The U.S. would like more information on agriculture and more reliable figures on the economy. It is particularly wary about a precise population count; the experts estimate the present population at 750 million, but concede that it could be as low as 650 million or as high as 800 million.

China-watching will become increasingly important as the old leaders fade back and the new ones come onstage. Says M.I.T. Professor Lucian Pye: "Though Chinese Communism is here to stay, it is certainly going to change greatly." There are plenty of important clues for the China-watchers to keep their eye out for. They will watch for signs that the younger technocrats in the Chinese government are making any headway against the insistence on doctrinal purity, as the technocrats have done in Russia. Will the successors of Mao, involved with their own problems, retreat in the face of American power in Viet Nam, seek a compromise with the Russians, adopt a less inflammatory international stance, be less adamant about Taiwan?